Welcome to the largest and most detailed survey yet performed of BDSM practices

Please note that we have completed the first phase of data collection, so the on-line questionnaire is no longer available. If you’d like to see the questionnaire, or fill one out for your own interest, please download the .pdf file using the button at the bottom of this page (we’d be happy to receive a copy of your completed questionnaire, but please note it will only be used as part of any future data gathering). Thank you to all those who put in so much effort to help us gather the data.

We will be posting some of the results of the survey to this web site. If you’d like to receive an announcement when results are posted, please click the link at the bottom of the page. In the meanwhile, sex research professionals may find some of the resources we have collected useful. Simply click here for the list.

To date, there have been very few thorough academic surveys of BDSM (Bondage & Discipline, Dominance & Submission, & Sadism & Masochism) practitioners. We intend to change that with this survey. The results will provide anyone interested in this area of sexual expression with useful, accurate information about many aspects of BDSM practitioners. By completing the questionnaire, you will be helping establish this accurate picture of who does BDSM, how, and why. To ensure statistical accuracy, we’d like to have well over 1,000 completed questionnaires.

It will require approximately two hours of your time to complete the questionnaire. We know that this is a significant committment on your part, but then no one has taken quite such a detailed snapshot of the BDSM communities and sub-cultures before. We feel that it is important to get this research right and that a detailed questionnaire is what is needed to achieve that. If you cannot schedule the time needed to do the whole questionnaire at once, we have set the survey up so that you will be able to take a break and come back to where you left off at a later date.

If you’d prefer to do the questionnaire off line to send it to us when you’ve completed it, you can download a pdf of the questionnaire. Since you have reached this page on our site, please download your .pdf file from this web page only. Thanks. Representatives of local BDSM organizations can distribute printed copies of the .pdf questionnaire to their members, but please before you make copies. Thanks.

You can get the free Acrobat Reader software to view and print the .pdf file from Adobe.

This is an anonymous survey (which means that we will not gather any information from your answers that could track your answers back to you), so we encourage you to be honest with your replies.

Who should complete this questionnaire

The people we would like to answer this questionnaire are past and current practitioners of any form of BDSM. If you feel you have some interest in practising BDSM, but have not yet explored your interest, we need your answers, too. If you are attracted to any of the following activities and/or rôles in your adult play, you’d be a good volunteer for this research (they’re in no particular order): bondage, discipline, pain, domination, submission, sadism, masochism, restraint, rope, handcuffs, whips, floggers, watersports, leather, rubber, latex, doctor/patient play, baby/parent play, scat, master, mistress, servant, slave, dog, top, bottom, electrical play, rough sex, fetish, BDSM, B&D, adult baby, french maid, mistress, forced cross-dressing, daddy, boy, nanny, smoking fetish, piercing, tattooing, branding, corsets, uniforms, shoe/boot fetish. If none of these things are fun for you, you should not answer the questionnaire.

We are looking for people new to the scene as well as people who are very experienced, because it’s important for us to have as wide a sample as possible.

You must be prepared to answer fully and honestly some intensely personal and detailed questions about your BDSM and sexual practices. It is, as they say, all in a good cause.

Who should NOT complete this questionnaire

If you have no interest in practising BDSM for emotional or erotic pleasure, please do not complete this questionnaire.

If you have fetish interests only, but no interest in bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, sadism, or masochism, please do not complete this questionnaire. Thank you.

Confidentiality

Please note that this is a confidential questionnaire. No-one will be able to see your your name or address, because you will not provide that information directly or indirectly. On this Internet version of this questionnaire, we record no information about you, your browser, or your Internet connexion. This way, there is no way for us to trace your answers back to you after you have completed the questionnaire, so we urge you to be as accurate and thorough as possible with your responses.

Filling Out the Questionnaire

If you decide to fill out the questionnaire, you will be expected to answer all the questions and you must answer them fully and honestly. That is why this questionnaire is designed to be anonymous. Your honest responses will ensure that our research continues to be valid. If you do not wish to proceed, please visit another site. Thank you.

This is a very comprehensive, detailed questionnaire. We felt it was necessary to make it this complete, since we doubt such a thorough survey will be done again for many years. You’ll be helping to make it thorough, too. We’d rather gather too much information than discover too late that we forgot to ask an important question. Once you start, please continue to the end. It will probably take about two hours for you to answer all the questions. Please work through them one at a time, reading each question fully before answering it.

Except where noted, the questions are about your own experiences and opinions. When you feel that none of the possible answers we give you are quite right for your situation, please choose the one closest to your situation. In some cases, we start a question with If you are. In these cases you may leave the answer blank if you do not fall into that category. For example, if a question starts with If you are attracted to the opposite sex, do not answer the question if you are not attracted to the opposite sex, but do answer it if you are heterosexual (straight) or bisexual.

Thank you

We understand that filling out this questionnaire completely requires a significant commitment from you. Thank you for your help with this research. If you have any questions about the research, please contact Trevor Jacques ().

Other ways you can help this research

If you are the editor of a BDSM magazine or a representative of a BDSM organization (such as the club secretary or communications representative), you can help make this an even better survey. If you could distribute copies of the questionnaire to members of your BDSM organization who are not on the Internet, that would be a great help. If you could make mention of our survey and ways to contact us in your magazine or club newsletter, that would help a lot, too. Please contact Trevor Jacques ( before you distribute copies or do an editorial. Thanks.